Hans Tung knows how to spot a unicorn. During his career, he has invested in 11 startups that have gone on to attain billion-dollar valuations, including Airbnb, Bytedance, Slack, Wish and Xiaomi. Tung is also one of the few venture capitalists that feels equally at home on both sides of the Pacific. A native of Taiwan, he moved to California aged 13 and began his career in Silicon Valley, before becoming one of the first VCs at a US firm to move to China full-time in 2005. Since moving back to the US in 2013, he has continued to invest in both markets.

Tattoo culture has exploded in China in the last few years, as the country’s younger generations abandon centuries-old prejudices against the practice and embrace it as an expression of individuality. Chinese millennials are getting tattoos in record numbers, but some are being forced to keep them hidden.

Pronouncements that the Belt and Road Initiative is failing are premature, argues Tom Miller, author of China’s Asian Dream and Senior Asia Analyst at Gavekal Research. He is well-versed in the problems facing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and predicted many of them. In his 2017 book China’s Asian Dream, he warned that China’s preference for cultivating close relationships with individual leaders could be a long-term risk for BRI. Eighteen months on, this looks prescient. New governments have won power in Malaysia, Pakistan and the Maldives, and renegotiating deals signed by their predecessors are high on the agendas.

What a difference a year makes. Last summer, there was a sense of unstoppable momentum behind the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s trillion-dollar plan to build a network of infrastructure connecting Africa, Asia and Europe. When China hosted its 2017 Belt and Road Forum, 29 heads of state and delegations from another 100 countries traveled to Beijing, hoping to cash in on what President Xi Jinping described as the “project of the century.” This year the landscape, at least from the media’s perspective, looks dramatically different as even China’s closest partners make more cautious noises about the BRI.

Compared to other sectors, Chinese e-commerce firms are among the first batches of firms to embrace automation. China accounts for nearly half of global demand for AGVs, enabling one warehouse to process up to 100,000 orders a day with a staff of 20 human workers, work that previously would have required 300-600 people, according to Beijing-based startup Geek+, a leading domestic robot maker in logistics industry. Other tech giants, like Alibaba and JD.com, have also announced plans to invest billions of dollars to roll out next-generation technologies including totally unmanned warehouses and last-mile delivery robots and drones.

Online data theft is rife in China, affecting more than 80% of Internet users, and tech companies often display a cavalier attitude to using people’s personal information. But things may change. In May, the government implemented new data protection rules called the Personal Information Security Specification, which was hailed by some analysts as a watershed for data privacy, with a few even comparing it to the European Union’s game-changing General Data Protection Regulation law. While there are important differences between the two, Beijing’s new rules appear to reflect a wider shift in the way the Chinese government, companies and consumers perceive online privacy.

Learning how to please Chinese audiences without alienating moviegoers in the US is becoming crucial for Hollywood as box office receipts stagnate in home market but explode in China. Quarterly ticket revenues in China surpassed those in North America for the first time ever in the first three months of 2018, with Chinese cinemas netting $3.15 billion compared to $2.85 billion in Canada and the US. Those figures were boosted by massive takings during the Lunar New Year holiday, always a peak time for Chinese cinemas, but China could become the world’s largest film market in whole-year terms in 2019.

Will two executive-level people doing the same job with the same education background and experience be paid differently? The answer is yes. And unsurprisingly, one of the two is female. How big is the gender pay gap at the executive level? Professor Huang Rong at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, who studied a sample of over 34,000 executives from US publicly traded firms using data spanning an 18-year period, found women executives are paid 31% less than male executives. Although it can partly be explained by objective considerations such as title, experience, company size and performance, a 19% gap still exists.

Economic changes taking place in China are rippling across the world, causing rapid upheaval in global supply chains. Manufacturers are moving to lower-wage economies, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is creating a new web of trade flows and the rise of cross-border e-commerce is accelerating demand for goods from across the world. And then, of course, there is a possible global trade war to factor into the equation. Dealing with all this uncertainty requires ice-cool pragmatism, as FedEx’s China head, Eddy Chan, has learned.

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Information, analysis, and interviews about the Chinese economy and doing business in China, from the people who know it best. Presented by the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, China's leading business school.